Find Your Adventure

Asia

June 24, 2010

Follow South African explorer Mike Horn and his expedition team as they trek through Pakistan's Karakoram Valley high in the Himalayas.

The Pangaea Project (PAN Global Adventure for Environmental Action) is a four-year exploration spanning the globe initiated by South African explorer Mike Horn in 2008. The project was devised by Horn as a way to engage international youth in exploring the world around them, learning about human impacts on the environment, and actively participating in clean-up and community projects.

Having engaged in beach and island clean-up projects in Borneo and India earlier this year, Horn and his expedition team now find themselves in the majestic heights of the Himalayas, guiding a group of eight young explorers on a month-long trek over Pakistan's Karakoram Valley to witness firsthand the amazing views of Nanga Parbat, Broad Peak, the Gasherbrum peaks, the Baltoro Massif, and the mighty K2.

For me, it’s about being part of a team that is the Adventurers of the Year. A whole group of people made a huge effort toward this project—people from University of California, San Diego, local Mongolians, the Mongolian Academy of Science. This project has made me realize that anything in the world is possible, as long as you have the support of your friends. That makes all the difference in the world. And that’s taken to a larger scale now that the readers of National Geographic Adventure have offered their support. They definitely nominated everyone who has been involved, not just me.

Turning my education in engineering into one of the greatest adventures of my life has been a huge journey. The idea to search for the tomb of Genghis Khan occurred to me while backpacking with friends in Mongolia. I came back dreaming of doing something outrageous, something that everyone thought was impossible. But to continue to work on it. To have your friends believe in it. To have your family believe in it. And to have your colleagues believe in it. It really makes me believe anyone can do anything.

Our long-term goal is to set up some protection mechanism to preserve the cultural heritage of Mongolia, which has had a huge impact on the rest of the world. The Mongols basically created a lot of what we know of as our modern history. Genghis Khan was one man with a dream. He was the rejected son of a nomadic family who was left to die in the woods. He rose to power, uniting all his people, and then turned outward and basically built an empire larger than Napoleon and Alexander the Great combined. And that story really hasn’t been told completely. It’s been looked at from different perspectives, but the greatness of his achievements, in a lot of ways, is underestimated. That is a major goal of this project: To share the true history of the foundation of our own cultural past. It will be a long process, but we are hoping, with the support of the public and people of Mongolia, we can to help preserve their cultural heritage.

Last November we introduced you to the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, recognized for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, actions sports, and humanitarian work.
Their accomplishments ranged from the longest BASE jump ever to educating 10,000 women and girls in war-torn Afghanistan to rocketing 350 miles above the Earth to save a telescope. Then, for our first ever Readers’ Choice Adventurer of the Year Award, we asked you to vote for the person you felt best embodied the spirit of adventure. (See the entire Best of Adventure feature here.)

Today,
with nearly 20,000 votes cast, we are thrilled to announce a tie. Both
winners are equally impressive, but in entirely different ways.
Explorer-engineer Albert Yu-Min Lin organized a high-risk
expedition into Mongolia’s “Forbidden Zone” to search for the lost
tomb of Genghis Khan using state-of-the-art mapping technology. Wounded Iraq
war veteran Marc Hoffmeister led a team of soldiers,
many missing limbs, up the dangerous West Buttress route on Denali.
When we delivered the news to each winner, both assured us of one
thing: They could not have done it alone—and their adventures continue.

February 17, 2010

Text and photographs by Kyle Dickman.I'm at Khone Falls on the Mekong River in Laos with filmmaker-kayaker Trip Jennings (above, center) and Zeb Hogan (below), the host of the National Geographic Channel's Monster Fish show and an expert on the region's fishes.

We're trying to figure out how a proposed dam at the falls, one of the world's most productive fisheries, will affect migratory fish that range from pinky-sized carp to 500-pound catfish--Southeast Asia's whiskered equivalent of salmon. (Follow their progress here.)At Khone Falls, the river divides into hundreds of different channels and drops off a 60-foot cascading waterfall. Which channels fish use to migrate depends on the size of the waterfall. Basically, the bigger the vertical drop, the fewer fish use the channel to migrate.

We've outfitted Trip's kayak with a depth-finder and a GPS to map water velocity, depth, and gradient. We're hoping to figure out what the migration parameters are for different species of fish (as in, big fish migrate up this channel because the water velocity is less than 20 mph, or whatever the case may be). What we find, will tell us if other channels share the same characteristics as Don Sahong, the site of the proposed dam. Don Sahong is hypothesized to be used most by migratory fishes because of its relatively mild whitewater.

We've been at Khone Falls for four days now. The first two days we rode mopeds past water buffalo and monasteries to scout waterfalls. On Sunday, we decided to run Somphamit Falls, a difficult stair-stepping 60-foot drop with fish traps lining the banks. Trip fired it up, recorded the data, and sent it to Sea Floor Systems, the California-based company who designed the system we're using to process the data. The fish traps suggest fish use Somphamit Falls as a migratory channel, but the data will show us whether they're making it past the waterfall in dry season or being turned back. Does this channel share some of the same characteristics as Don Sahong? I'll let you know what we find out.

This expedition was funded in part by the National Geographic Expeditions Council.